Feedback Relevance Spaces: Interactional Constraints on Processing Contexts in Dynamic Syntax

Christine Howes,Arash Eshghi

doi:10.1007/s10849-020-09328-1

Abstract

Feedback such as backchannels and clarification requests often occurs subsententially, demonstrating the incremental nature of grounding in dialogue. However, although such feedback can occur at any point within an utterance, it typically does not do so, tending to occur at Feedback Relevance Spaces (FRSs). We present a corpus study of acknowledgements and clarification requests in British English, and describe how our low-level, semantic processing model in Dynamic Syntax accounts for this feedback. The model trivially accounts for the 85% of cases where feedback occurs at FRSs, but we also describe how it can be integrated or interpreted at non-FRSs using the predictive, incremental and interactive nature of the formalism. This model shows how feedback serves to continually realign processing contexts and thus manage the characteristic divergence and convergence that is key to moving dialogue forward.

Highlights

As shown in Example 1,1 even in broadly monological contexts, dialogue is co-constructed by multiple interlocutors
We present a corpus study of backchannels and clarification requests in British English dialogue5 that shows that 85% of this feedback occurs at places that the Dynamic Syntax (DS) model of dialogue predicts they ought to be licensed—so-called Feedback Relevance Spaces ( FRS; Howes and Eshghi 2017)
We focus on an empirical investigation of the placement of backchannels and clarification requests; and for the reasons outlined above, we will refer to these collectively as feedback unless we want to emphasise their differences

Summary

Introduction

As shown in Example 1,1 even in broadly monological contexts (e.g. lectures, storytelling; Rühlemann 2007), dialogue is co-constructed by multiple interlocutors. Backchannels are usually considered to be “positive” feedback, signalling understanding, with clarification requests taken as “negative” feedback indicating a problem of misunderstanding or misalignment. 2.2) is not incidental: “...‘uh huh’, nods, and the like, in passing the opportunity to do a full turn at talk, can be seen to be passing an opportunity to initiate repair on the immediately preceding talk” This inversion of the usual assumptions around how understanding is reached in dialogue, such that the possibility of misunderstanding is ever present (rather than assuming that the default case is perfectly understood conversational exchanges) prioritises the management of potential misunderstanding in dialogue, with backchannels acquiring their myriad functions as a direct consequence, depending on the action in progress when the backchannel is produced. It is rather that devices are available for the repair of problems of understanding the prior talk, and the passing up of those opportunities, which ‘uh huh’ can do, is taken as betokening the absence of such problems” (Schegloff 1982)

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Conclusion